The big publishers want someone they can send on the Jewish book circuit, somebody the old ladies can see marrying their granddaughters.

- Joshua Cohen

Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate.

- Joshua Cohen

Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.

- Joshua Cohen

What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.

- Joshua Cohen

There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

- Joshua Cohen

The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.

- Joshua Cohen

The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it's mystic.

- Joshua Cohen

The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. It is a way to keep writing safe - to keep reading safe from writing.

- Joshua Cohen

The Internet makes the writer work harder - I have to say things here I've never said before, or else be caught out in repeating myself.

- Joshua Cohen

The Internet is a tool, a technology, and we like to say that it has all of these properties, but really, it's just a place where our writing is.

- Joshua Cohen

The Internet is a contest between people with the same name to be the person who dominates that online space.

- Joshua Cohen

Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.

- Joshua Cohen

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

- Joshua Cohen

Most novelists are narcissistic egomaniacs who would probably fit somewhere on the CEO spectrum.

- Joshua Cohen

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

- Joshua Cohen

I've never enriched myself via privatization schemes in Eastern Europe.

- Joshua Cohen

I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

- Joshua Cohen

Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

- Joshua Cohen

Books were in my family - books were my family.

- Joshua Cohen

All technology does is give us back to ourselves. So to be anti-technology in a sense is to be anti-human.

- Joshua Cohen